“Time may change me, but I can’t trace time”

I recently had a chat with a teenager about how she has all this rights, how parents have to see that their kids are happy and they have to procure this happiness by whatever means necessary, even at the expense of their own happiness. I’m not going to elaborate on the talk itself and the substance of it, although there is a lot of material there. I’m going to focus on how, when I was a kid, I felt as entitled as her and I felt the same way, and how I thought I was so right I could never change my mind about this. That was then of course, this is now. I changed and my views and ideas changed from then to now. We all change don’t we? And we use this knowledge as an excuse to do certain things. Being as it is the beginning of a new year what I’ll say is still fresh in our memories, and these are “resolutions”. We all make them for the new year. We make an image of our future self and our future self is way better than our present self. That’s the one who always eats right, always exercises, never looses it’s cool, saves, and starts his work and does its errands with plenty of time to spare. We dream about it, we bet the farm on it, it has all of our dreams and expectations riding on it’s shoulders. That future self is, well, awesome. Now, let me ask you, if that’s the case, why isn’t the present self that awesome? It should be, after all, it’s the future self of our past self, is it no? And that past self made all of the mostly same new year resolutions the present self is making and nothing happened, most of the time. So, what’s going on? Well, we like lying to ourselves. We like making excuses. We love rationalizing irrational behavior. We tell ourselves “I’ll feel more like it tomorrow” perfectly knowing we are not going to feel more like it tomorrow, well, maybe the next day then. We do all of this because we procrastinate. Yes, it is my leitmotif if you had been distracted and hadn’t noticed. We procrastinate and make reasons why we do so. In previous posts we’ve talked a little about this. We procrastinate because we are afraid, because we don’t feel like it, because we think we better under pressure, for many reasons, most of them because we think we’ll feel like it later. In some cases this is true. We feel more like working on an assignment rather than partying, watching TV or whatever other activity on the night before we have to turn it in than on the night it was given, this is true. The thing is that not all of the things we procrastinate on are, let’s say it this way, deliverables. We procrastinate also on changing for the better. On making changes that are going to transform us on better people, healthier, wealthier, happier. Here’s the apparent paradox. We act as if we won’t change and as if we are going to change at the same time. The paradox goes away when we realize that we are going to change in a way that, if we don’t do the work, is going to make us worse than we were before, and that if we don’t want that we need to work on it today to prevent this natural decay. So, what will you do, today, to be that awesome future self we all dream about?